This invention is a method for users to create and edit web page layouts in a consistent manner and offers a means for describing a web page layout of any level of complexity. This invention also allows for the possibility of storing and sharing layouts by means of a compact serialized sequence of characters representing the layout. This method also allows for templates to be embedded in other templates and for content to be included in the templates.
Website design is an evolving practice and there are modern standards for web page design. One of the more difficult things in web design is to define a layout in a standard way and edit it later especially if it is a complex layout. Even if standards were followed there are numerous approaches with some approaches favoured over others.
Prior art involves HTML documents coupled with CSS (cascading style sheets) to define the layout as written and stored in static text documents. The prior art in web page design includes misusing HTML TABLE tags that were meant to be used for tabular data but were used for layouts—TABLE tags does not lend itself well to layouts. Prior art is also accomplished via software that is used to design web page layouts in what is known as WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors. WYSIWYG editors display an approximation of the final displayed layout. The invention allows for direct display and manipulation of the layout in modern web browsers. The invention encodes the layout in a compact format regardless of complexity of the layout. The compact format can then be stored, shared, used and reused in very sophisticated ways.